Raya Yotova 
Jan Gossaert: Drawings & Paintings (Annotated) 

Jan Gossaert is a Flemish artist from Maubeuge. He has decided to accept as his last name his hometown name or Jan Mabuse. Jan Gossaert was influenced very strongly in his young years by the Italian masters. He is also one of the first Flemish artists to visit Rome and bring in the Flemish tradition the romantic style of Italian painting during the Renaissance. The artist has achieved great fame in his native Flanders and worked in St. Luke’s guild in Antwerp. He has drawn large-scale altars, portraits, and mythological scenes.
Jan Gossaert has worked for a number of crowned persons in Europe and has been a much sought-after and well-known author among the royal courts and the nobility of the aristocracy. He was a contemporary of the great Albrecht Dürer, but unlike him, he never worked on wood engraving, although he had left us magnificent and masterfully made drawings.
Little is known about the artist’s biography. It has been established with certainty that he was of French origin and that he grew up in a French-speaking family. It is also well known that after his stay in Italy he started working for a number of mighty rulers and patrons in Europe and went around the royal courts and that he was registered in the artists‘ guild of Antwerp.
According to some art historians, Jan Gossart was the first Flemish artist to paint naked bodies in religious scenes and compositions. It is also a fact that this style is borrowed from him by the Italian masters from whom he has studied. Like other famous Flemish artists, he integrated landscapes into his religious compositions.